A report by the Southern Poverty Law
Center about the patriot -- or militia -- movement in American didn't attract
very much attention when it was released. Columnist David Kolb wants people to
know that the report found that more people support or belong to militias than
ever and he thinks we should be concerned.
Kolb noted this trend in his column, "The president is black and the
militias are back."
Kolb wrote:
In case you haven’t noticed, the makings are there for a nice, bloody insurrection in our own country.
Don’t just take my word for it. The Southern Poverty Law Center hate-monitoring group, headed up by renowned anti-Ku Klux Klan attorney Morris Dees, keeps careful watch on such trends. The center’s recent report echoes an eerily similar study released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2009.
Morris Dees has spent more than 35 years battling hate groups in the U.S.
That latter report was shelved by the U.S. House, reviled by Republicans in Congress, because it characterized the militia movement as “rightwing extremism,” a fundamentally correct assessment, but misunderstood by the laughably dense political right, which took it as a slur upon itself.
In the SPLC’s estimation, the ranks of the antigovernment, so-called “patriot movement” today eclipses by far, in number of groups and adherents, even the dirty water high tide that culminated in the Timothy McVeigh neo-Nazi terror bombing of Oklahoma City in 1995.
So, the report got my attention. But it certainly didn’t command much of a hearing from the public or generate the news coverage one might expect when a serious threat to the homeland, especially one originating from inside the homeland, seems to have materialized in such stark fashion.
Here's a sampling of what MLive and Muskegon Chronicle readers had to say:
Does the reported growth of the militia movement concern you? Do you think it is related to the fact that the president is black?
Post your comments below or return to the original conversation.